Today Matt Stout of the Boston Globe continued the healthy habit, when reporting on the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, of stating that it hides its donors. (See Baker’s Push to Curb Emissions Draws a Familiar Foe: His Own Party). But since no one can say with any accuracy whose interests MassFiscal represents, why include it in a story at all?
Why even interview MassFiscal spokesperson Paul Craney? Neither the Globe nor I nor anyone outside MassFiscal’s secret lair knows who MFA actually represents. And by represent, I mean those hidden donors. Stout says MassFiscal is “a conservative-leaning nonprofit.” Gee, nonprofit sounds nice. But as Tufts’ Jeffrey Berry and colleagues wrote about in the October 2018 issue of the journal Interest Groups & Advocacy, some nonprofits act as interest groups. MassFiscal is an interest group and so we reach the question, whose interests is MassFiscal representing?
On the TCI matter, MassFiscal is probably shilling for oil and gas interests. That’s my best estimate. Who throws dark money around in the oil and gas industry? The point is though, neither the Globe nor any other media willing to print what MassFiscal says can accurately identify whose interests the group is fronting. How does that help readers?
Then there is today’s description of MassFiscal as “conservative-leaning.” This is like saying Donald Trump tells the occasional little white lie. As I pointed out in Naming Rights: How Should the Media Describe Dark Money Groups, in litigation MassFiscal is represented by out-of-state right wing advocacy shops funded by the extremist Koch (oil and gas) and Mercer networks.
MassFiscal has defied an office of Campaign and Political Finance public resolution letter to disclose an illegal dark money donor since August 2016. It’s “polls” are routinely misleading (correct me if I’m wrong but I think that the Globe has been judicious enough to not report on MassFiscal’s polls at all). It has proposed an illegal and immoral minority voter suppression scheme, in hopes of electing MassFiscal founder Rick Green to Congress. It has made the Boston Globe’s own “hypocrites hall of fame.”
I give Matt Stout credit for mentioning that MassFiscal won’t disclose its secret money sources, and he did a good job in March 2019 going in MassFiscal’s Biggest Funder Is a NonProfit It Founded. If you have to mention MassFiscal at all, it is imperative to identify it as a dark money front.
But until MassFiscal comes clean about its dark money sources and who it really represents, it is a disservice to the public to mention them at all.
The Washington Post recently adopted a new slogan: “Democracy dies in darkness.” I agree.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money (and other things).]